Taught by Ben Polak, an economics professor and now Provost at Yale University, this free course offers an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Drawing on examples from economics, politics, the movies and beyond, the lectures cover topics essential to understanding Game theory–including “dominance, backward induction, the Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling.”
Since Game Theory offers “a way of thinking about strategic situations,” the course will “teach you some strategic considerations to take into account [when] making your choices,” and “to predict how other people or organizations [will] behave when they are in strategic settings.”
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Alejandro Jodorowsky, as anyone who’s witnessed a movie of his play out onscreen might guess, has steeped himself in the mystical arts, but it would take an astute viewer to guess that he received some of his earliest training in the field of mime. During his time in Paris in the 1950s, the Chilean-born filmmaker, yet to shoot a single frame but having already run his own performance troupe back in Santiago, began studying under Étienne Decroux, not only a master of mime but a master teacher of mime. Jodorowsky then joined and went on a world tour with a mime group led by one of Decroux’s especially promising students, one Marcel Marceau.
Few today could think of mime without Marceau’s name coming to mind, and none could think of Marceau without having at least a sense that the man redefined the art. Performers had, of course, used their bodies to wordlessly evoke different elements of the human experience since antiquity, but Marceau — who could take his viewers through an entire human life in four minutes — brought it to another level entirely.
Some of Jodorowsky’s fans might say the same about the director, and in the video above they can witness perhaps the two men’s only surviving creation: Marceau’s 1959 performance of The Mask Maker, a piece Jodorowsky thought up for him.
“Jodorowsky would say, ‘Marcel, will you accept if I give you an idea for a story?’ ” remembered Marceau in a late interview. “I replied, ‘Of course, if the idea is good.’ Jodorowsky said, ‘What do you think of a man who tries on different masks showing a variety of emotions? He puts on a laughing mask that gets stuck on his face; he tries desperately but it will not come off. He has to blind himself to take it off his face.’ I did the choreography myself, and then we shared the rights for this pantomime.” Two other Marceau-Jodorowsky works in mime followed, The Saber of the Samurai and “another cruel tale” called The Eater of Hearts.
At once shocked and moved, according to Projected Figures’ “Brief Guide to Alejandro Jodorowsky,” by the “excess of violence” in these mime routines, Marceau nevertheless performed them with what looks like the fullest commitment to the concept. Jodorowsky in turn made use of what he’d learned from Marceau even as he switched arts and began making films. The influence shows in his very first short film, 1957’s La Cravate, a wordless physical performance for the camera. History hasn’t recorded whether Marceau ever watched it, but he’d surely recognize his former collaborator’s sensibility in the content: it also goes by the English title The Severed Heads.
Coffee, 35 cents per pound. A self-sharpening plough, $3.50. A whip, a buck fourteen. And a gallon of gin, 60 cents, which was “about two-thirds of a day’s wages for the average non-farm white male worker.” (View the prices in a larger format here.)
But I’m less intrigued by the wholesale price of the various items Smith’s hypothetical country storekeeper would pay to stock his shelves in 1836, though I do love a bargain.
It’s more the type of goods listed on that inventory. They’re exactly the sort of items that figure in one of the most memorable chapters of Little House on the Prairie—“Mr Edwards Meets Santa Claus.”
Okay, so maybe not exactly the same. Author Laura Ingalls Wilder was pretty explicit about the simple pleasures of her 1870s and 80s childhood. Her family’s bachelor neighbor, Mr. Edwards, risked life and limb fording a near-impassable, late-December creek, a bundle containing his clothes, a couple of tin cups, some peppermint sticks, and two heart-shaped cakes, tied to his head. Without his kindly initiative, their stockings would have been empty that year.
Presumably, the Independence, Kansas general store where Neighbor Edwards did his Christmas shopping would’ve stocked a lot of the same merch’ that Smith alludes to in the above fragment of a bookkeeping-related story problem. Online bookseller John Ptak, on whose blog the page was originally reproduced, is keeping page 238 close to the vest (coincidentally the last item to be mentioned on the inventory, almost as an afterthought, just one, priced at 50¢.)
Childhood recollections aside, perhaps there was something else in Mr. Edward’s bundle, something the adult Laura chose not to mention. The sort of hostess gift that could’ve warmed Pa and Ma on those long, cold frontier nights…
Some gin, perhaps…or wine? Rum? Brandy?
Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve been well provisioned, laying the stuff in by the barrel, hogshead, and pipe-full.
As for that “bladder” of snuff, a post on the Snuffhouse forum suggests that it wasn’t a euphemism, but the actual bladder of a hog, paced with 4 pounds of snortin’ tobacco.
Of course, Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve also carried a healthy assortment of wholesome goods- hymnals, children’s shoes, calico, satin, whips…
Last Thursday was National Pencil Day, which commemorates, according to The New York Public Library (NYPL), “the day in 1858 when Philadelphia immigrant Hymen Lipman patented his invention for a pencil with an eraser on top, creating the conveniently-designed pencil we know and love.”
Of course, Lipman’s invention didn’t take place in a vacuum. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, American inventors were hard at work, trying to find ways to make improvements to the pencil, whose history traces back to 1564. During those early days of our republic, “American pencil-making was in sorry shape,” writes NYPL. “Poor materials made domestic pencils smudgy and frail, in comparison to their superior British counterparts, which were made of purer graphite.” So the pressing question became: how to improve the quality of the graphite? Enter Henry David Thoreau, America’s great essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist and tax resister. And apparently innovator too:
Seeking employment after studying at Harvard, [Thoreau] worked at his father’s pencil factory, which Edward Emerson — son of Ralph Waldo Emerson — recalled as being somewhat better than the typical American pencil factory at the time. Still, Henry David Thoreau aspired to improve the family business, so he hit the books at the Harvard College library to find out more.
…Having no knowledge of chemistry, Henry David nevertheless came up with a formula to make a pencil rivaling that made in Europe. It was the first of its kind in America.
Soon, Thoreau pencils were taking over the market, and the family’s business grew and grew. Thoreau pencils were awarded twice by Mechanic Associations and gained a local reputation in Boston for their quality. Ralph Waldo Emerson himself praised them. News of Thoreau’s pencils spread quickly, and soon, Petroski writes, they were “without peer in this country.”
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To get you ready for the new season of Better Call Saul, the show’s creators have put out a faux employee training video from the proprietor of Los Pollos Hermanos, Gustavo Fring. You know Gus from Breaking Bad, and something tells me you’ll be meeting him again in Season 3 of the prequel. It airs next Monday (4/10) at 10pm on AMC. Enjoy.
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Note: There are a few not-safe-for-work scenes in the film.
The world of music video was in its infancy in the late 1970s. MTV had yet to exist, and promotional films for singles were seen as useful for the times when a show couldn’t book a band to play live, or the band just didn’t play live any more. Into this world fell many a commercial director, used to the promotion side of the promo film business. But there were also directors like Derek Jarman, the punkest of UK directors at that time. This new format paid the bills in between features, and let him experiment.
Though he would go on to work with the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths, Jarman’s first promo video is above, for three songs from Marianne Faithfull’s masterpiece of a new wave album, Broken English(1979).
Faithfull had been out of the public eye for years, having spent a lot of the ’70 trying to kick her drug habit. The anger and cynicism of this album, her cracked but commanding voice, and the electronic sounds were such that many forget she released two other “comeback albums” before this one. On Broken English she forcefully rewrites her own history as an artist, not content to be seen as a drug casualty or Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend.
Jarman was known at the time as the controversial filmmaker of both the homoerotic Sebastiane and the anti-Royal Jubilee, which more than any film at the time encapsulated the UK punk scene. It’s both brutal and romantic and charmingly D.I.Y.
The Broken English promo film features three songs, bracketed by black and white footage of Faithfull wandering around London and playing Space Invaders in a local arcade. The first, “Witch’s Song,” is the closest to Jarman’s short films during that period: languid, ambiguously gendered young people, apocalyptic dockside ruins, reflected mirrors, occultism and debauchery. The second, “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” features scenes of domesticity double exposed and/or projected over footage of Faithfull. The final one, for the title track, is a short collage of 20th century fascism and carnage, featuring Hitler, Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, British strikes, and self-immolated monks.
The two artists got along so well that she recorded the theme song for his film The Last of England, featuring a very young Tilda Swinton.
Both Jarman and Faithfull went on to successfully reinvent themselves, but for the 21st century viewer, they are also both worth rediscovering.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
A fascinating 20th century literary strain, “documentary poetics,” melds journalistic accounts, photography, official texts and memos, politics, and scientific and technical writing with lyrical and literary language. Perhaps best exemplified by Muriel Rukeyser, the category also includes, at certain times, James Agee, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and—currently—Claudia Rankine and “powerhouse” new poet Solmaz Sharif. It does not include Edgar Allan Poe, famously alcoholic 19th century master of the macabre and “father of the detective story.”
But you’ll forgive me for thinking, excitedly, that it just might, when I learned Poe had published a text called The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a condensation, rearrangement, and “remixing,” as Rebecca Onion writes atSlate, of “an existing… beautiful and expensive” science textbook, Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology, including the original plates and a “new preface and introduction.”
My mind reeled: what wondrous horrors might the morose, romantic Poe have contributed to such an enterprise, his best-selling work, it turns out, in his lifetime. (For which Poe was paid $50 and, typically, received no royalties). What kind of experimental madness might these covers contain?
As I might have assumed from the book’s total obscurity, Poe’s writerly contributions to the project were meager. For all his genius as a storyteller, he could be a long-winded bore as an essayist. It seems he thought this aspect of his voice was best suited to the original writing he did for Conchologist’s First. His biographers, notes University of Houston professor emeritus John H. Lienhard, all “mutter an embarrassed apology for Poe’s shady side-track—then hurry back to talk about The Raven.” Onion quotes one biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who writes, “Poe’s boring pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.”
As for its “shadiness,” the book also elicits embarrassment from Poe devotees because, as esteemed biologist and historian of science Stephen J. Gould wrote in his exculpatory essay “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” it was “basically a scam,” though “not so badly done” as most allege. The naturalist Wyatt, a friend of Poe’s, had begged his publisher to release an abridged student edition of his original lavish and pricey $8 textbook, which had not sold well. When the publisher balked, Wyatt contracted Poe to lend his name and considerable editorial skill to a more-or-less bootleg “CliffsNotes” version to be sold for $1.50. To make matters worse, Poe and Wyatt were both accused of plagiarism, having “lifted chunks of their book from an English naturalist, Thomas Brown,” Lienhard points out.
Gould defended Poe as a rewriter of others’ work. “Yes, Poe plagiarized,” as Lienhard summarizes the argument. He presented Brown’s, and Wyatt’s, work as his own, but, “fluent in French, [he] went back to read Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist” and made his own translations. He wrote his own introductory material, and he reorganized Wyatt’s book in such a way as to provide “genuinely useful insight into biological taxonomy.” Poe’s edition—with its “formidable subtitle,” A System of Testaceous Malacology, arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools—actually proved a hit with students, and likely not only because it sold cheap. It was the only publication in Poe’s lifetime to make it to a second edition.
Maybe humanist readers approach the work with biases firmly in place, expecting a genre that’s dry by its very nature to contain all the literary brilliance and entertaining intrigue of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lienhard suggests as much, describing irritation at how his “literary friends” ignore the scientific work of writers like Thoreau, Thomas Paine, Goethe, and poet Oliver Goldsmith. “Poe’s excursion into natural philosophy,” he writes, “was an embarrassment to people who are embarrassed by science in the first place.” Maybe.
Both Gould and Lienhard shrug off the less-than-scrupulous circumstances of the book’s creation, the latter citing a “cynical remark” by playwright Wilson Mizner: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you steal from many, it’s research.” At least he doesn’t go as far as Mark Twain, who once wrote in defense of Helen Keller, after she was charged with literary borrowing, “the kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.”
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Can comedy be taught? The question has no clear answer, but if it can, Steve Martin would surely occupy the highest rank of comedy teachers. He could probably teach a fair few other crafts as well: besides his achievements as an innovator in stand-up as well as in other forms of comedy — famously appearing on Saturday Night Live so many times that even some of his fans mistake him for a regular cast member — he’s also established himself as an actor, as an essayist and novelist, and even as a respected bluegrass banjo player. Still, despite his impressive artistic Renaissance-man credentials many of us, at the mere mention of Steve Martin’s name, laugh almost reflexively.
Hence his place at the front and center of “Steve Martin Teaches Comedy,” a new online course from Masterclass, the education startup whose faculty roster, as we’ve previously featured, also includes the likes of Werner Herzog and Aaron Sorkin. “We’re going to talk about a lot of things,” says Martin in the course’s trailer above. “We’re going to talk about my specific process, performing comedy, we’re going to talk about writing.” For a cost of $90, Masterclass provides more than 25 video lessons, a downloadable workbook with supplemental lesson materials, and an opportunity to upload your own material for critiques by the rest of the class as well as maybe — just maybe — by Martin himself.
Whether or not a master comedian can pass along his knowledge as a math or a language teacher can, anyone who’s paid attention to Martin’s comedy so far, as well as his reflections on comedy, can sense how much intellectual energy he’s put into figuring it all out, even at its extremes of absurdity, for himself. Students unwilling to follow suit need not apply, nor those worried about landing agents and getting headshots, for the esteemed instructor makes it clear up front that he grapples only with the most important question in comedy, as in life: “How do I be good?” You can sign up here. Or you can purchase an All-Access Annual Pass for every course in the MasterClass catalog.
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